Ah, Canberra: Australia’s national capital suburb, described in the early 1990s by the now long-out-of-print CountyNatwest Glossary of Financial Terms as “…a city of monuments and roundabouts, where the mind is so highly prized it is exempt from any meaningful activity”. I could never quite get to the bottom of why that now defunct investment bank had a grudge against the Jewel of the Limestone Plains. Perhaps it had been knocked back on an advisory mandate for some Federal Government privatisation project or other? Whatever; that fascinating little entry in an otherwise arid tome was excluded in subsequent editions after Fairfax Media began publishing it. But I digress.

Earlier today I visited the National Portrait Gallery and, for the first time, came face-to-face with Guy Maestri’s stunning portrait of singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. In a space hung with many excellent works, it stood out. The picture is a close-up and intense study of Gurrumul’s face; looking at it, however, I felt I was meeting the whole man with a sense of completeness and immediacy that none of the other portraits conveyed of their respective subjects. The key, I think, lies in the perfect balance Maestri achieves between the darkness of the blind Gurrumul’s eyes and the radiance of his face. The symbolism may be obvious – a man who can’t see brings light into the world through his artistry – but it works.

The portrait won the 2009 Archibald prize. Maestri gives an interesting account of how he worked on it on this Art Gallery of NSW page.